Forgotten Heroes: Terry Kath

What’s in a Name?
After the band’s recorded debut,
Chicago Transit Authority was forced
by the threat of legal action to change
their name once again. Kath and his
cohorts opted to just cut it short, and
thus Chicago was born. Riding high
on the LP’s success, they hit the road
for a relentless touring schedule of
200 to 300 shows a year, a pace that
didn’t abate for Kath’s entire tenure in
the group. With his newfound success,
Kath began acquiring more guitars,
including a 1969 Gibson Les Paul
Professional with a pair of unconventional
low-impedance pickups that
required a special impedance-matching
transformer for use with a standard
high-impedance-input amplifier. This
guitar became one of his favorite standbys
in the years to come.

A year after recording their first
album, Chicago hit the studio to record
Chicago—aka Chicago II—which was a
monster success and reached No. 4 on
the U.S. charts. The biggest hit off the
album, the previously mentioned “25
or 6 to 4,” was written by keyboardist
Lamm and is easily one the group’s
most recognized pieces. After the sophomore
release, Chicago went on a tear
nearly unprecedented in the history
of commercial music, releasing eight
studio albums and one live recording
over the subsequent eight years—all
of which achieved platinum status.
Other opportunities followed, and in
late 1972 Kath and Chicago’s manager,
Guercio, were approached by amplifier
maker Richard Edlund to see if they’d
be interested in financing his start-up
company. The two men were intrigued
by Edlund and his little amplifiers, and
thus started Pignose Industries, which
debuted their first “legendary” Pignose
amplifier at the 1973 NAMM show.
Kath naturally became Pignose’s first
endorsee and appeared in an ad for the
company, decked out in gangster attire
with the slogan, “What Pignose offers,
you can’t refuse,” appearing below
his picture.

Kath made another guitar change
that same year, finally settling on a
Fender Telecaster that he used almost
exclusively for the rest of his career. He asked his tech, Hank Steiger, to make a few
modifications, including replacing the stock
neck pickup with a Gibson humbucker and
changing the bridge from a 3-saddle model
to a 6-saddle version that would facilitate
more precise intonation. In not-so-subtle
support of his side business venture, Kath
affixed a few Pignose stickers—25, to be
exact—as well as a Chicago Blackhawks
logo and a large sticker with the Maico
motorcycle company’s logo.

A Tragic End
Despite Chicago’s enormous success
throughout the 1970s, Kath was quite
depressed. “He was an unhappy individual,”
Pankow remembered in the liner notes
of Chicago Box. “His relationship was not
going well. He was also certainly more
dependent on chemicals than he should
have been. He wasn’t addicted to anything,
but he was abusing drugs. We were all
doing drugs at that stage of the game. But if you’re incredibly unhappy and depressed
and doing the drugs on top of that, it compounds
the situation.”

On the night of January 23, 1978, in a
tragic turn, Kath accidentally shot himself
in the head while messing around with
one of his handguns. The only witness to
the incident was Chicago’s keyboard tech,
Don Johnson, whose account of what happened
was later summarized by Pankow.
“Evidently, he had gone to the shooting
range, and he came back to Donny’s apartment,
and he was sitting at the kitchen
table cleaning his guns. Donny remarked,
‘Hey, man, you’re really tired. Why don’t
you just put the guns down and go to bed.’
Terry said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and he
showed Donny the gun. He said, ‘Look,
the clip’s not even in it,’ and he had the
clip in one hand and the gun in the other.
But evidently there was a bullet still in the
chamber. He had taken the clip out of the
gun, and the clip was empty. A gun can’t be
fired without the clip in it. He put the clip
back in, and he was waving the gun around
his head. He said, ‘What do you think I’m
gonna do? Blow my brains out?’ And just
the pressure when he was waving the gun
around the side of his head, the pressure of
his finger on the trigger, released that round
in the chamber. It went into the side of his
head. He died instantly.”

The loss of Terry Alan Kath was felt
across the world of music, but nowhere
more than with his bandmates in Chicago.
“Right about there was probably what I felt
was the end of the group,” says Peter Cetera
on Chicago’s website. “I think we were a
bit scared about going our separate ways,
and we decided to give it a go again.” The
band decided to soldier on and auditioned
somewhere around 50 guitarists to take
Kath’s place before ultimately settling on
Donnie Dacus. But without Kath’s guitar,
the band was not the same. Many divide
the long history of Chicago into pre-Kath
and post-Kath, and it could be argued that
the majority favor the earlier period.

Kath was an incredibly versatile guitarist.
On one track he could play some of
the wildest, most sonically expansive guitar
you’ve ever heard, and on the next he could
play the smoothest runs this side of Charlie
Christian. He lives on in the music he created
and continues to inspire those who
listen to his records.

Like many new Kath fans, his daughter,
Michelle Kath Sinclair—who was only
3 when he passed away—is on her own
odyssey to find out more about her father.
Her story is told in the yet-to-be-released
documentary Searching for Terry: Discovering
a Guitar Legend, and she lays out her reasons
for creating the film in a message on
the official Terry Kath website (terrykath.com). “I always felt that he never got the
credit he deserved for his contribution to
guitar. His approach to playing and writing
music were unique to his own. I was always
saddened by his untimely death, not only
because I missed out on knowing him, but
also because there was so much more that
he had to offer the music world.”

Chicago’s keyboardist and lead vocalist
Robert Lamm probably said it best in the
liner notes for Chicago Box when he stated,
“He was an original thinker. He was an
inventor, in many ways. He invented the
way he played his guitar. He was the kind
of guy that could probably teach himself
to play almost any instrument.” He added,
“I don’t think there’s ever been a better
rhythm player. And then, Terry’s leads are,
for that day especially, world class stuff.”

From the time he first picked up a copy of Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same as a teenager, Corbin Reiff has been obsessed with music and guitar in particular. Originally from Sacramento, CA, Corbin joined the U.S. Army after graduating High School and spent five years in uniform including one year overseas in Iraq in 2009. After getting out Corbin has spent the last few years as a working music writer in the Seattle area where he lives with his wife Jenna and his two dogs, Hendrix and Page.

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